FBS

And so we come to the portion of the Power Five previews where we cover the conference that was looking in from the outside at the College Football Playoff last year. In 2015, three-quarters of the teams ended the year with winning records, but none ended them with fewer than two losses after conference champion Stanford fell at...

The smallest of the Power Five conferences, and the only one that does not currently hold a championship game, managed to crown a solo champ in 2015 and earned a spot in the College Football Playoff quartet as a result. There the Sooners were steamrolled 37-17 by Clemson, and the Big 12 is just 1-3 in New Year's Six games since the...

Even though Florida State technically won the last BCS national championship, the College Football Playoff has been far kinder so far to the Atlantic Coast Conference than the previous system. The season before, the Seminoles knocked off Northern Illinois in a BCS Buster game that went bust, drawing the short end of the stick for the...

In 2015, the Big Ten distributed $27.6 million to each of its 14 member schools, second only to the SEC in terms of money generated by a college conference from football. Over the past two seasons the conference has begun to turn things around in the postseason, winning the national championship with Ohio State in 2014-2015 and then...

Independents are that random relic of a bygone period of college football history that continues to linger on. Three decades ago independents dominated the college football world, with teams like Miami and Penn State and Notre Dame all putting together championship seasons in the 1980s without affiliating with a conference. Then...

Born from the ashes of the Big East and fortified by a raid on Conference USA (and failed bids to go bicoastal with the Mountain West's Boise State and San Diego State), the American Athletic Conference first rose up in 2013 in the final year that it retained automatic-qualifying status under the old BCS system. UCF claimed the final...

Relative stability has been the MAC's calling card for most of its existence. Ohio is the only original member, but half the membership is part of the group that formed the league's nucleus in the early 1950s and three others joined back in the 1970s. The last three have been around for two decades or more. While it has rarely been...

For the second half of the BCS's existence, no conference put more pressure on the entrenched system of power-conference hegemony than the Mountain West. With teams like Utah, TCU, and Boise State all staking their claim for national recognition, the league forced a new discussion around the place of these mid-major schools in the upper...

Conference USA has largely devolved into Sun Belt 2.0, with five of its 12 members formerly hailing from that league and another two having participated as non-football members of the Sun Belt. It has watched as most of its best members have been poached away by the AAC, restocking through the Sun Belt and directly from the FCS ranks in...